One thing Mark and I have never seen eye to eye on is the family budget.
It's not that we have different priorities, or that one of us wants to spend more and the other wants us to save more, or that we have different assessments of our savings needs. I think we're pretty well aligned on basic budgetary values. It's just that we have never really agreed on how to keep track of everything.
Every time we talked about it we wound up arguing about what goes in which category, what kind of a spreadsheet to set up, how to track how much each person is spending, whether to track spending with the credit card data or whether to use cash for some categories, whether we should be allowed to borrow from one category to make up for an excess in another, whether to set priorities and buy things immediately or whether to defer buying things, whether just one of us should be in charge of the budget or whether to divide categories between ourselves… and we always ended extremely frustrated with each other because we seemed, um, unable to explain ourselves to each other. At least, it was pretty obvious that my ideas didn't make any sense to him, and his didn't make any sense to me.
In other words, we have always had different ideas about how to engineer the budget apparatus.
(Look, couples are supposed to fight about money, right? OK, well, this is how we do it.)
So we have avoided problems by not budgeting at all. Believe it or not, this has mostly worked okay so far, but as our family grows it gets harder to meet yearly savings goals by the "save what's left at the end of the year" method.
So. Budgeting.
Somehow, I can only assume because Mark decided to be nice and do it close to my way, we have finally come up with a method that may work. I say "may" because we haven't actually saved any money with it yet. But it (a) makes sense to me and (b) is not odious to Mark, which is better than most of the plans either of us ever came up with before.
Here is what we are doing (I think).
First, we agree to pay for absolutely everything we can with credit cards. (We pay them off in full each month.) That makes data that's easy to download, as do personal checks, the next choice. Cash is a last resort, and we will each try to limit our cash withdrawals to $50/month.
Mark keeps the "official" record of the budget, including dividing things up into categories. But we decided to design the categories for easy categorization of expenditures based on the information in the credit card statement. So we have a "clothing" category and a "groceries" category. But we also have a "Target" category and a "Walgreens or Walmart" category. Why? Because I buy household goods AND groceries AND clothes AND other stuff at places like Target, and if I do this all in one trip it shows up on the credit card statement as "Target." Why should Mark worry about dividing up a single trip to Target into all the categories? Let's just set a spending limit at Target and be done with it. We can move money from one category to another if we happen to have the information, but we also can just leave it at that and not worry about it. The point is to try to cap our overall spending, the categories are only guidelines.
I am in charge of deciding how to spend some of the categories, and Mark is in charge of deciding how to spend others. I am in charge of clothes, but Mark is in charge of "outdoor gear" (skis, winter coats). I am in charge of household goods, but Mark is in charge of hardware. And I am in charge of the grocery budget, because I make the lists, even though Mark does the shopping.
So anyway, I hadn't been tracking grocery expenditures this month, and just today I sat down and looked at the credit card statements and realized that if we are really going to stay within the month's budget, we only have $80 to spend for groceries this week, which is about half what we usually spend and two-thirds what we figure we ought to spend. Okay then!
Fortunately, the freezer and pantry are really well stocked right now, so I decided to plan only four dinners and one lunch. We'll have leftovers or make do with what we've got (e.g., scrambled eggs and toast) the rest of the time. I also deferred non-essential restocking until the following week — even though we ate the last of the wild rice this week, we don't need to buy more just yet.
Meal 1: chicken lasagna (I already have everything except ricotta cheese, and I could use cottage cheese if I had to), green salad, stir-fried vegetables.
Meal 2: taco soup (I only have to buy one can of beans, one can of hominy, one can of Ro-Tel tomatoes, and the seasoning packets), fried tortilla strips, green salad again.
Meal 3: black beans and rice with cooked greens (I only have to buy parsley and rice).
Meal 4: salmon patties, tri-color succotash (I only have to buy lima beans) and okra.
One lunch: a big batch of tabouli (OK, I have to buy lemons, tomatoes, parsley, and cucumbers, but hey, I have some mint left over from this past week…)
So my list looks like this:
1 green pepper
1 cucumber
2 parsley bunches
1 head lettuce
2 tomatoes
2 lemons
1 bag frozen lima beans
1 envelope ranch dressing mix
1 envelope taco seasoning mix
1 can hominy
1 can pinto beans
1 bag brown rice
5 lbs whole wheat flour
1 canister iodized salt
Enough fruit for a week (Mark's choice — he can decide when he sees the produce section)
and, if there's still room left in the budget,
15 oz ricotta cheese
1 bottle red wine vinegar
1 can Ro-Tel diced tomatoes with chilies
I showed the list to Mark and he thought about it and added to the bottom of the list "Chocolate if in budget."
"OK, but you're not allowed to buy chocolate and not buy my ricotta cheese."
"D'oh!"
I will let you know tomorrow whether we managed to bring it in under $80. (We go through a LOT of fruit.)
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