More month than money

When there is more month than money.

One of the things I didn’t mention about my adventure into weekly planning is a scenario that I had almost forgotten. Never Ever Again!! This common occurrence happens when there is more month than money!

No more money!

Before I started meal planning this was a common occurrence.  We would get to the last week of the month, with no money in the bank and very little food in the house, and often ran tight on sugar and milk. It was also common for us to have to scrounge around for petrol money.

Once I started my envelope budgeting, milk money and petrol money were no longer a problem; we also now had some money for fruit and vegetables all the way to the end of the month. It was still touch and go at times but we just made it to the end of the month. Then I began meal planning and suddenly there were even months where there was some money left over!

Once a week is too much

I wrote recently about my experience doing the weekly meal plan idea and how difficult it was having to do a big shop every Sunday, whether I wanted to or not.

The thing I didn’t write about was the budget aspect of this little experiment. I have written about how every time you go into a store it costs you around 10% more than necessary, and that month we really felt the extra costs.

Running on empty

Any left over money that I had been putting away in the envelopes from the previous months disappeared. We didn’t have a choice. Going into the store every single week cost us a fortune. We had both cars running on fumes because we had dipped into the petrol envelopes for grocery money.

By the last week of that month we didn’t even have money for bread! I thankfully had flour and yeast in the cupboard and I dug up the last of the sugar (I only needed 2 teaspoonful’s) and I found an easy bread recipe that use water and margarine instead of oil and didn’t use eggs, which was a good thing as by that stage we didn’t have eggs or oil left and it was still 5 days to pay day! I made my own bread.

I now make the bread daily as everyone loved the taste!

Going shopping every two weeks wasn’t all that much better and money was still extra tight.

Thank goodness we are back to normal and as we reach the end of the month, there is petrol in our cars, food in the cupboard and at least some money to go into the emergency jar! We changed the name from the savings jar to the emergency jar for obvious reasons.

If you have months like this where there is more month than money, maybe you should try envelope budgeting and/or meal planning and see how it works for you.

Tells us what you do when the month lasts longer than the pay check.

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