This month we’ve celebrated my daughter Emily’s 4th birthday and we’ve done it in style – celebrating for an entire week, with her birthday falling on a Wednesday this year. We began the week of birthday celebrations with a family dinner which was a bit impromptu, taking advantage of a long weekend and the fact that the extended family hadn’t already made plans that Saturday night. We ended up with 17 people for dinner, with the cousins bringing entree and Aunties contributing salads to the meal, while we provided the BBQ meat and birthday cake (chocolate mud, made from scratch!) for dessert. Everyone had a great night, especially my daughter who was in her element under the spotlight of all the attention.
Wednesday was Emily’s birthday, and also kindy day, so Tuesday night was spent making nut-free, egg-free, dairy-free cupcakes to share with her classmates (good reviews on that one!). We held a present opening ceremony when I got home from work on Wednesday – it’s the best feeling when you pick a present that you know is the perfect thing for your child.
Then Saturday was Emily’s party with her friends. I had made some enquiries about holding a party at a local indoor playcentre, but the cost of this was $300 for 8 people including Emily. With Emily having just started kindy over a month ago we thought we’d rather do something where the kindy families could get to know each other better and decided to invite the whole class (20 kids) to a local park with excellent play equipment. While the venue was free, we still needed to cater for enough food, drink, plates, lolly bags and prizes for the group and there was little change from $300 in the end. While this amount stretched to over 25 children (including siblings), and around 25 adults it did cap off quite an expensive week!
So, suffice to say, my savings this month have not met my goal but have been roughly halved. I did set myself a tough target to save a third of my wage, which I moved out of my account on the day that I got paid. But part of this has slowly crept back in to my regular account. Still I can be grateful that my savings are heading in a positive direction, if not necessarily at the rate I had intended.
Over the next week then, it’s important for me to keep track of my spending, so that I don’t need to pull in any more of my savings to rescue the budget blowout situation. I remember one lesson from Cath Armstrong’s book Debt Free Cashed Up and Laughing and that is to shop first at home. You can be amazed by how much food is stored at home – in the pantry, the fridge and the freezer. If you add it all up, there is guaranteed to be more than a week’s worth of food accumulated at any one time. Think of the pasta, the rice and potatoes in the pantry - there’s the basis for four dinners of the week. Eggs and vegies make another meal, salad and meat yet another. Even the flour can be turned into crepes and filled with a chicken based savoury filling for an extravagant panty-based meal.
So that’s my challenge for this week – to see how long I can get by without having to go shopping. Getting to the end of this week without having to purchase any more food items would be a terrific achievement and would mean that I don’t have to spend any more before I get my next pay.
What do you do when your budget is straining towards the end of a pay period? If you have any money saving or making strategies I’d love to hear them. Send me a post of drop me an email at livewelllivesmart@gmail.com .
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