Budgets, Really Cheap Food, and Panda

Being married to someone who is a finance major, you learn a thing or two about what money really means and how much it means to you and your family. Lately, we've been, for lack of a better word, really LAZY about our spending habits. It got to the point where it was not only driving Peter crazy, but it was making me a little uneasy too. So, after much council and planning, we've called this month, March Money Madness. We want to go this whole month following just a few simple rules and see how much money we actually save. Some of the rules are as follows...

#1- No Plastic! Only Cash!- We gave up our debit and credit cards, put them in an envelope, and put them away so we wouldn't be tempted to use them at all this month. Paying with only cash helps us actually see what we spend and makes it harder for us to spend the money.

#2- Keep to a Strict, Tight Budget!- Peter loves spreadsheets. He makes them as often as he can. So of course when we decided to have a budget, he had to make a spreadsheet. He was really good at making a reasonable yet tight budget about what we should spend on groceries, utilities, gas, etc.

#3- No Eating Out!- This one doesn't seem like it should be one of our big rules, but it is a big one for us and is, in fact, the main reason we've been bad with our money. We wanted to see how much money we would save if we just didn't eat out all the time.

Starting this March Money Madness, we went to a wonderful place in Idaho Falls called WinCo. You can get a ton of food for a really good price there. We made a list of what we wanted to stock up on for the month and went to see how much of our grocery budget we could save just by taking the trip to this place. Thanks to WinCo, we only used almost half of our budget, which means we have enough food to last the month, plus some extra money to go to our local store if we need anything later!

Had to take a picture of how much stuff we got!
I don't think I've ever seen the back seat of our truck so full of food.
The picture doesn't really do it justice...

After the shopping spree, we took some of our free spending money and went to Panda Express (aka one of my most favorite food places ever!) to enjoy some good food, good fortunes, and goof around a bit.

My husband being...my husband...

I would say this is fairly accurate fortune for Peter.

Don't know how accurate this one is about me. Hahaha!

:) Sure do love this guy!

Even though it's still the beginning of the month, we're still doing pretty good on our budget so far and we're both determined to stick with this so that we'll have many more Panda Express trips to come in the near future:)