Grocery Tweaks

One of my favorite ways to save extra money is through grocery shopping.  It is a flexible expense that simple changes can alter.  Currently, my family is in a phase of life with growing children, so grocery costs are growing.  It seems I have not been able to save any money in the past few months to put towards debt, and this bugs me.

I feel like there is an untapped money source just sitting there, waiting for a few tweaks to make it aid in our debt-free goal.  A few weeks ago I purchased the book Family Feasts for $75 a Week by Mary Ostyn.  I have read her book, A Sane Woman's Guide to Raising a Large Family and have been an avid follower of her blog Owlhaven for several years, so I was excited to gather some more of her money-saving tips.  The book is wonderful and is filled with some great recipes that are not a huge change for our family making it easily doable.

I also use the Food Planner app to really streamline my shopping and menu planning, plus a couple more apps to help me compare prices.  With all these tools, I am hoping to have a few good months of grocery planning to save a couple hundred dollars.

A couple years ago, when I blogged on TheNorthForty, I would do what I called Power Saving Months where I would use up every last thing in our pantry and freezer, becoming extremely creative and buying only the bear minumum in groceries.  This would save us an extra $100 to $200 in a month.  This is my goal for this month.

I have all ready spent $250 on groceries this month which included a monthly trip our local club store.  Currently, we have a lot of odds and ends in the house which leads me to believe that, with a little creativity and planning, I may be able to finish out the month with only $150.  This would save us $100 this month to use toward debt.  I am also hoping this goal will jump start me back into some old habits in order to save a little more in future months.

You can follow along with my monthly grocery spending on the sidebar to the right.  Wish me luck!

Daily Number Checks

Modern technology is a pretty exciting thing when used appropriately. With all the apps we have on smart phones and tablets, we can bring our entire financial filing cabinet with us everywhere we go. In the realm of staying focused on paying down debt, this is a fabulous thing.

On my phone and tablet, I have a variety of apps dedicated to keeping my eyes on the prize, including my bank's app, grocery shopping apps, credit card apps, price comparison apps and a simple calculator. While I don't need to use every financial application every day, I do strive to check in on the numbers every day. By that, I mean simply opening them up, glancing at where we stand on spending, grocery shopping, and how much debt we still need to pay off.

The most important daily number check I do is our bank account. It takes less than a minute to open the app, log in and see exactly how much money we have in our bank account. By doing this, it makes me conscious of reality and focuses my thoughts in the right direction for the rest of the day. Having an actual number in my head helps me fight off impulse buys while I'm out and about. It helps motivate me to do an extra hour of work that day. It gets my brain thinking about as many ways as possible to save a penny here or a penny there. Ultimately, it keeps me grounded in reality.

Numbers in bank accounts can be so easy to ignore or mentally warp to our advantage. It's one of the reasons Dave Ramsey's envelop system is so effective. It makes bending reality impossible. There is no room for denial.

I recommend downloading some banking apps and adding a daily numbers check to your routine. It may be just the mental focus you need to keep you on the debt-busting track.

Graphs and Spreadsheets

I am an extremely visual person, mostly because I am an extremely forgetful person.  Because of this, whenever I want to stay hyper-focused on something, I need to surround myself with constant visual reminders that are convenient and impossible to ignore.  Since lighting my personal fire on getting debt-free, I have Dave Ramsey's book The Total Money Makeover as well as the Workbook sitting in a central location, I keep this blog tab open almost all the time in my browser, I have excellent Bible verses about debt on my phone's homescreen and my grocery planning is hanging very prominently on our kitchen wall.  Everywhere I look is a reminder of our focus.

But while these are all great things to get me motivated, I decided I needed a little bit more.  I really like to be reminded quickly and easily of the progress that I have made.  Anytime I get discouraged, it is so important for me to have a handy reminder of all the hardwork paying off.  Anyone who has tried saving money knows that one moment of discouragement or hopelessness can lead to an impulse by that blows it all.

For that reason, I turned to my amazing husband to create a few different graphs and spreadsheets to help me out.  An accountant by trade, he is phenomenal when it comes to creating just what I need.  Numbers confuse and overwhelm me.  I am horrible at math, percentages, interest and anything that involves thought beyond a simple plus or minus.  I mean, we're talking really bad at numbers.  So I am very blessed to just be able to tell my husband exactly what I need to see in a snapshot in order to quickly comprehend our state and jump start my fire anytime it starts to ember.

Now, added to all my other visual reminders of our herculean goal, on our fridge will be three helpful printouts focused on improvement and progress which shall be updated monthly:

• Expenditure Pie Chart - A simple, elementary pie chart of the previous month's expenses broken out by category (courtesy of the wonderful Quicken software) to help me focus in on any areas that can be shaved back.  **Improvement Focused**
• Budget - Our entire month's budget down to the last penny (which my husband has always made and I have rarely stuck to) so that we can focus as a couple on keeping in line with it.  Whenever a change is made, it will be immediately penciled in and accounted for.  **Improvement Focused**
• Debt Snowball Countdown to Freedom - Dave Ramsey's spreadsheet which shows all of our current debt and how long, based on minimum payments alone, it will take us to pay off our debt.  My husband has updated this so I can punch in any extra progress in Excel and easily see that date get  even sooner.  **Progress Focused**

On top of these three printouts on the computer, I also have a very snazzy spreadsheet that my husband created for the current credit card on which we are working that allows me to enter the extra money I have made for the month and see instantly how many months and how much interest I have saved.  It shows me that even the smallest amounts can add up to major savings once interest is factored in.  **Progress Focused**

Staying focused on improvement and progress really helps remind me that I can make a difference.  It is so easy to slip into the mindset that all those little things will never matter and that we are forever stuck as victims in a daunting chasm.  But seeing something as small as a $25 savings actually saves us $48 in interest transforming that $25 profit into a $73 profit shows me that I matter.  I am not a victim of circumstance.  I can build a ladder to climb, even if slowly, out of this chasm.  And that's exactly what I am going to do.