Lunches

Today I managed to buy a week's worth of lunches for the boys for under $20. I got bread, ham, cheese, pickles, oranges, chips and biscuits. Made and froze sandwiches and packaged up some chips and biscuits for recess snacks, along with the oranges. Pleased with that! In less positive news, kids' expenses is overdrawn thanks to a MathsOnline subscription I had forgotten to account for. DS17 has agreed to pay $10 a week for that though.

An early pothole

I just remembered that I need to budget for union fees! I'm not willing to give this up so my plan is to take $5 a week from water and $1 from groceries and put it towards union fees. Let it rain! Later edit: also NESA accreditation fee - took another $2 from groceries to cover.

What is this?

The $500 challenge is my own invention. I have decided it is an amount I could live off, not easily but possibly. I am fortunate to have really low rent, only $110 per week, so the remaining $390 would need to cover food, bills and expenses for myself and my two teenaged sons. They also work part time so will cover their own prepaid mobile phone costs and the youngest contributes $10 a week towards the upkeep of his rabbits. $500 is not a tiny amount, given my low rent, but it represents a significantly smaller sum than I have been spending. I am thinking I might try to keep my spending to around $110 a week for groceries, $30 a week for fuel, $100 a week to cover phone and internet / electricity / mobile / gas bills, $30 for health insurance, $45 for car and contents insurance and rego, $25 for kids expenses (TKD, clothing), $20 a week for youngest son's music lessons and $19 a week for spending (hair, grooming, clothing, coffee, contact lenses, takeaway). It's a little bit breathtaking to think about actually. My first step has been to set up my budget. I use YNAB which is a subscription I need to budget for, along with Netflix, iCloud and Apple Music. I've decided I'm going to ditch Netflix and ask the kids to contribute $2 a week each for Apple Music and iCloud (we have Family Sharing set up for these). There are plenty of shows I can watch on iview and SBS On Demand and truthfully, I don't want to spend too much time watching TV anyway. I have a weakness for books and there are a couple I want to buy at the moment but I'm going to borrow them from the library or just save up my personal spending money. Or if I can find stuff I can sell, I might be able to fund that. TKD costs $50 a month for both kids so that will take quite a chunk of the kids' expenses budget @ $12.50ish per week. The rest needs to cover their clothing and school expenses. I'm not sure how realistic that is. But they are working part-time so might help out there. We're coming up to winter in a month so I'm going to try really hard to minimise heater / drier usage and keep the electric bill down. Blankets, jumpers etc. Will need to take care with car travel to minimise petrol usage and costs too. Groceries is going to be a big challenge. I've had a few thoughts - switching from the bakery bread and real butter I love to cheap bread and marg, eating more meatless meals, getting eggs from my mum's chooks, buying the generic brands more and buying supermarket brand milk. Plus cheaper cereals, like weetbix. If I need to buy eggs though, I will buy free range. I have a heap of rice so maybe some stir fries and fried rice. Dahl. Cheaper ham and cheese for kids' sandwiches. Takeaway will just not be an option. Maybe hot chips once a week. No coffees. I will shop more at Coles and make the most of Flybuys offers that are in line with my budget for shopping. I'm growing out my hair and won't worry about colouring it, although I only did that occasionally anyway. I'd like to budget a bit for regular waxing but not sure if that will really be doable.