Shopping Day: 31 May, 2012

Woolworths: $60.72
Aldi: $65.81
Coles: $56.86

Total: $183.39


This was the fourth shopping trip of the month, which I'm trying to keep as small as possible by pulling meals together from the stockpile. That didn't really happen so much this week, but I tried. A big reason for that is because I've kept the other three shops this month well below my original goal of $300 a week. In fact, the biggest weekly total all month was $277. And the other reason is that we just happened to run out or low on a lot of stuff. The stockpile, such that it is, still only consists of relatively small amounts of a relatively small number of items.  Until I can get more shelves, and change up my shopping strategy a bit, that's not going to change.

While the original goal was to keep three of the four shops around $300 and then the fourth one at around $150 (I quickly realized that keeping it at $50 to 100) wasn't practical), my new goal is to keep the average weekly total at $240 or less. That's over $20 a week less than the original goal, but I'm confident that I can do it.

My weekly total for this month were $277.57, $255.39, $237.76 and $183.39, for a total of $954.11 and a weekly average of $238.53. So not only did I hit my goal of a $240 per week average, but I'm slowly but steadily dropping the monthly total. I've been doing this for three months, and the first month I spent a total of $1070, the second month a total of $1043 and this month a total of $954. Based on the average weekly cost of $340 that I worked out earlier this month, that means that I've saved over $1000 in the last 3 months.

Not that I've got a bank account with an extra $1000 in it or anything. The money, unsurprisingly, has been spent. I'm not entirely sure what it's been spent on, but it's definitely been spent. Some of it was spent on plane tickets to fly Jack and James up to Ballina for the school holidays. Some of it was spent on a speeding ticket (not mine), on make-up (not mine), on new clothes (not mine), on Jack's birthday presents and party, etc. All perfectly reasonable purchases, I'm sure. Well, except for the speeding ticket. But I get the feeling that when the money is just sitting there in the transaction account, there can be an almost overwhelming desire to spend it.

So starting today, I'm moving the money I save (based on the $340 a week average I calculated earlier this month) from the grocery bill to a separate account. It's going to pay for our vacation this summer, and after that it's going to pay the credit card balance down (which is costing us over $55 a month in interest), for next year's vacation, and to add to our house deposit savings account as well.