Tuesday 6 September 2011

Deals are Breaking the Budget

As I've said before, DH and I have a weekly consumables budget of $100.  This consists of food, restaurants, health and beauty, pet supplies and home supplies like lightbulbs.  If I have a surplus, it gets carried forward to the next week.  Usually when the money's gone we stop spending.  Sometimes we do carry forward a deficit if we're in the mood to spoil ourselves.  This is usually followed by a pantry eating week to get back to positive.

We came into this week with an extra $15!  Our budget week starts on Friday, which just happens to be date night.  We decided to go to a chicken place with some friends for our Friday dinner out: $25.  Pretty good considering it wasn't fast food.  Then we got fast food for dessert.  DH has the coupon for this one, but he left it at home.  Let's call it $8.  So after restaurants, that leaves us with $82.  Surely this should be enough for groceries.

Knowing there were some deals I'd like this week, my groceries came to $35. It wasn't a full week of food, but I got enough proteins, starches, some fruit and a some snack. Our pantry will be able to fill in the holes and get us to next week.

Everything was going swimmingly.  Total spent so far of $68 leaving $32 in the budget for deals.  Here's where the wrench gets trhown into the mix.

I spent $7 at Loblaws on toilet paper deororant and body wash.  It was a great deal, so I rushed to pick these up.  Then I rushed back to spend an extra $4 on toilet paper and paper towel.  I really thought it was such a great deal!

This week there was also a Shoppers 20x the points day.  I hadn't planned on participating in one of these days before and I hadn't put a buffer in the budget for it.  Still, I wanted to try it out to see if I could actually save money.  I was moderately happy with my savings from the day; you may remember my post about my trip.  Even though the savings were good, I spent $56 out of pocket.  $15 will come back to me through a mail-in rebate, so $40 comes out of the budget.  I added to the stockpile, but $40 is a big chunk out of our budget!

Then I bought milk the next day $6.00 because we were out and discovered emergency frozen milk takes three days to thaw!

That makes a total of $57 on deals and poor planning.  So I started $15 ahead and ended $10 behind. Wow.  To top it off, I'm hoping to get in my coupon trains this week so I can pick up the deals I've yet to get!  Some body please stop me! 

I'm glad that we have a budget to limit what I can buy.  If not, I could fool myself into thinking I'm getting ahead by saving money even though I could be racking up debt.

Now that I've committed to trying out the Optimum points again to see if I can make it work I'll try to build up a buffer for these bonus days.   You can bet next week I won't be going over the $90 and may even have a surplus.  Sometimes a deal may not be the right deal for you.  I picked up a few of those this week.

2 comments:

  1. i do that too! it's such a good deal, i just can't pass it up.

    i've had to remind myself though that i no longer need to stockpile because i HAVE a stockpile. and the purpose of the stockpile was to last us while eric is in the academy...

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  2. It's so hard to stop!

    I'm still low on many stockpile items so I'm always on the lookout for good deals. When I see one and know my budget is gone I cry a little tear on the inside, haha.

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