Nothing like spending all morning entering receipts and checks from the last two months into Microsoft Money to make you want to lock up the checkbook and bury the credit cards. 90% of the receipts were for gas and McDonalds. Seriously I'm not joking, gas and McDonalds. I've already vowed not to eat McDonalds for the next 6 months (so far so good in the last 2 weeks). Every store I like is within 5-10 miles now (it used to be 15-30 miles) and the kids will be bus'ed to school so our gasoline consumption will be down too. Woohoo!
I should preface the rest of this post with if you didn't know, I'm a bit of a frugal person at heart. Since I don't "work" for money, I feel that saving the family money where I can is my contribution. So this morning I filled out half a dozen rebate forms (value $100+) and clipped coupons. I shop sales and attempt clearance racks. For some reason, I never have much luck with clearance racks. Now my mother-in-law, she finds so many gems, it's amazing (Thanks again for doing the bulk of the kids' back to school shopping!).
Anyway back to the point, I have a few decisions to make. First it looks like I'm going to have to seriously shop the ads and make stops at one or more grocery stores for my weekly shopping. The Midwest is so much cheaper in so many ways. $.50/lb for bananas and $6/lb for chicken breasts here makes me ill. (I'm used to $.29 and $2) I laughed when grapes were on sale here for $1.99, that's full price back in Ohio. So if I don't stock up on sales and shop around, our grocery bill is going to easily double. I used to be really good at keeping our bill low (a few years ago I kept 5 of us fed on $50 a week for a few months) but with Greg's pay raise last spring, I've been slacking and spending $150-$175 at one store once a week instead of $100-$125 between 2 or more stores. Ah well, it'll give me something to do while the Big 3 are in school, right?
Speaking of school, here's my other dilemma: school lunches. While the menu here is much better than our old school (I used to gripe all the time that they only served 3 main dishes: chicken nuggets, hot dogs, and pizza), it's $1.75 per kid per day. $5.25 a day and $26.25 a week for all 3. While I know I could make lunches for less (probably $20 or cheaper), is it really worth the $6.25 for the hassle? But then again $26.25 just seems like a lot to be spending for food that they might not always like or be good for them. After a lot of thought (probably more than necessary), I think I'm going to buy lunch items from the grocery store, have them help me pack their lunches (to cut down on the hassle on my end hopefully), and occasionally pay for the school lunches. Any advice from those who have been there/done that?
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