Boost Your Budget Pantry Challenge – Goal Week

 Welcome to the new Boost Your Budget Pantry Challenge series that I’ll be participating in and posting about throughout the month of January!!

Here’s the plan: 

During January we plan to challenge ourselves to eat from our pantries – to use up all that excess food sitting in the back of the cupboards, hiding in the refrigerator door, in the stockpile and from out of the freezer – and limit our shopping to as little as possible.

This is not a “no spend” month, this is a “make do with what you have on hand and spend as little as possible” month. 

Everybody’s personal goals will be different and we can each set our own rules – the point is merely to challenge ourselves and start off the new year with a boost to our budgets! We’re also giving away a $25 Coupon Clutch gift certificate each week to one participant who either leaves a link to a challenge post or a comment about their challenge goals. Won’t you join us?

I have quite a different goal than most of my other cohosts (at least I think so, I haven’t read all of their posts yet ) and it will force me to be a little more transparent than I have been in a while on here. Please don’t judge!!

Hubby and I are complete fools with our money…there, I said it!! 

Before we met we were frivilous with our money and it really hasn’t improved all that much since we’ve been together. Don’t get me wrong, we pay our bills (most of the time) and we provide for our son absolutely first, no questions asked, but we’ve done without food in our house (except for the boy) at times because we decided to buy a new toy or go out to dinner…well, you know…

My family spends about $500 in groceries every month for a family of three right now. That most likely includes going to dinner once or twice per week and possibly ending up eating scraps and scrambling at the end of the month. I make quite a bit more money per month than my husband and I get paid once per month. I pay the majority of the bills and we do a “big” grocery shop at the beginning of the month. He is paid weekly, pays a weekly daycare payment, and then we “live” off of the rest of his money for additional groceries and necessities. We have no savings and don’t use any type of credit. We usually have something in the pawn shop or owe somebody something, but we’re actually heading into January 2 (payday) with nothing owed…woohoo!!

So, here’s my goal:

We want to attempt to spend under $400 this month on groceries, toiletries, household items!!

This will definitely be using coupons combined with sales ads, shopping strategically (;)) at the stores in our town, cutting back on our dining out, and tracking it all in spreadsheets and here to help with accountability. That will be a 20% savings from our “normal” shopping and we will continue it as far as we can go in order to build a true stockpile.

My long term goal:

Next January, I will be TRULY eating from my pantry/stockpile just like my cohosts!!

I’m pretty sure that if this works for us, you all will be reading about this throughout the year, rather than just in January.

Today is Payday for me and the day that Hubby and I always look forward to doing our biggest grocery shop of the month. I made sure to buy a newspaper with all FOUR inserts (we’ve been slacking in the coupon collection department) and I’ve cleaned out all of the expired coupons from my binder. I think we’re ready for this and I would LOVE some encouragement along the way!!

I feel blessed to have been asked by Denise to help co-host this challenge and to have the benefit of such fantastic cohosts to challenge me and help me on stay track.

We want you to join us, too!

Each Monday during January we’re going to post an update of our goals and how we’re doing at meeting those goals through the linky below.  So figure out what your goals are – is it to save money?  to have more room in your pantry? to stop wasting food and thus help the environment?!!

Figure out why you want to participate in the challenge – I look forward to hearing about your goals too!!

(Bloggers: if you wish to join us, we’ll have a linky each week where you can link to your challenge posts.  The linky will appear on the blogs of all of the co-hosts so your post will get quite a bit of exposure!)