The Plan

Money is a funny thing. It's like calories, in a way. You think you have a pretty good idea of how much food you eat in a day, or rather how much money you spend, and you can go years without really examining the situation.

Tracking expenses and counting calories: they both sound like cruel and particularly grueling and tedious tasks, I'll admit. And honestly I can't imagine a scenario that would lead me to count the number of calories in my morning toast, my afternoon sandwich, my café americano with milk.  But lately, Chris and I have been paying an inordinate amount of attention to tracking our expenses over the last four months.

Now I do believe that in polite society we do not talk specific numbers when it comes to income and expenses. Period. But I will share with you some general findings that were - gulp - shocking.

How much does it take to supply groceries during a thirty day period for a family of four? I thought I had a pretty good idea. I settled on a number when creating our new budget. And then I back-tracked to see how much money I had handed over to the folks at Whole Foods. It wasn't what I thought. It wasn't even in the ballpark.

Take out sushi? Eek! Cash withdrawals? Appalling. Yarn purchases? I can't even look my husband in the face.

I have been following a blog called Simple Mom whose main goal is to help families simplify their lives, especially financially. The woman who writes the blog suggests that, as a family, you decide what your priority is. What is it that's most important to you and your lifestyle?

We settled on leading active lives and traveling and exploring.  After that, we each opened personal accounts that are separate from our main joint one, and we divert a specified amount of money every month to those to fund our running shoe purchases, gym memberships, yarn, fabric, fishing lures.

The next thing we did was to open several savings accounts to build our personal funding for camping trips, road trips, beach trips, as well as emergencies with the car and our health. We plotted out a budget in which we reduce our expenses by leaps and bounds and add to our already growing savings, albeit more modestly.

This grueling, cruel and tedious task has actually revolutionized my concept of money, and my concept of need. I already considered my family to be quite conservative in terms of money. But now we are getting downright frugal. And you know what? It's so much fun. Chris and I have turned this into a game. Ok, a competition. We figure we have saved hundreds of dollars already this month by simply prioritizing.

Today at the grocery store I walked the aisles with my phone's calculator app discretely open. Almonds? $6. 1/2 gallon of milk? $3.39. Broccoli? Ok, I'm embarrassed to say. But when I got to the cashier and my bill came out to $10 less than what I had budgeted for the week, I did my little happy dance and immediately sent Chris a text.

His response? "Yay! Extra wine money!"