Blog Number 268

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Well today was a day I was dreading a little.  The wife and I were going to go over the budget and make some changes.  Not making changes was an option however the consequence would be eventual bankruptcy.  Having that in mind we put our heads together.  I am a number cruncher.  At work I look at statistics all the time, try to see trends and then plan or alter the course accordingly.  The budget should be no different.

I downloaded the last 4 months banking and credit card statements.  I then threw every transaction into a category.  It was at this point in time that we discovered that we blow a lot of money and spent a lot more on gasoline and groceries than we thought we did.  Gasoline is not something we can change as the price keeps going up and we do not make that many needless trips.  Groceries and eating out is something we can change.  Normal things though like the gas/electric bill, water/trash bill, rent, etc. have to be what they are.  Anyway, after 2 pots of coffee and a few hours, we had our changes mapped out.  We are halving our eating out expense and are writing our planned dining out days on the calendar so everyone (especially the kids) can look forward to the next planned outing.  Hopefully this will remove the temptation to go out on the spur of the moment.  We are also budgeting the kids extracurricular activities as those always seem to come up and bite us at the wrong time.  As for gasoline, well we are going to keep a log of mileage in each vehicle and see what we come up with in a few weeks.  This would only help us in deciding where we will live next (assuming we do not renew our lease in our current house).

The wife is heading back to Costco (we went last weekend too) to compare prices and see if the $50 annual fee will be worth it.  The kids are opting to stay home with dear old dad (what a shocker) so we will need to plan out our weekly video we make for our YouTube account so I gotta get going so I can outline the storyboard.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon