Saturday, January 17, 2015

The 52-Week Money Challenge + Some Budgeting Ideas

One of my goals for 2015 is to save more. So Daddy and I agreed to do the 52-week money challenge. Actually last year I saw this money challenge already. But because I already have my saving plan, we didn't do it. Now, we will do it not just for us but for Matthew, my in-laws and my mother. Here's a sample chart if you are interested.

52-Week Money Challenge, Some Budgeting Ideas, saving, money savings
52-Week Money Challenge

For Daddy and me, I'll do the +50 increment that starts with 50 pesos, just like the above chart. For Matt, I will do the +20 increment that starts with 10 pesos. While for my in-laws and mother, I will do the +5 increment that starts with 10 pesos also.

I hope my in-laws and my mother will appreciate these small amount of money we can give to them at the end of the year. As for Matthew, all these will go to his savings account. We are planning to invest some of his saved money to stocks too, or mutual funds. We are still studying what's the best for his savings.

This year, as I promised to myself, we will do more of saving and investing. Last year, I started to monitor our daily expenses. With that I can easily see if we are already over the allotted monthly budget. Also, we limit going to grocery and schedule it once or twice a month na lang. However, upon checking my expenses monitoring sheet, I saw that we are not saving with that set up. 

Why? Since we go to the market every week, there are times we still go to the grocery even if we just had our bi-monthly/monthly grocery. Chances are we buy more than we should and I think also, we fail to buy all that we need for a month. We have no monthly meal plan too. Aside from that, when Daddy suddenly think of cooking something and we have no ingredients for that, we need to go to the grocery to buy. Which tempted us to buy that just those ingredients but others not in the list. With that, we over spend na.

What I did is to split the budget for grocery in 4 weeks so it will be like weekly going to the wet market + grocery. We always do a list of what to buy and as much as possible, we will only buy our basic needs for a week + a little buffer just in case we fail to go to the market and grocery same day next week. Glad that it's working better than our previous budget scheme.

Also, our top priority is always our basic needs. If we want to buy something other than our basic needs, that should be plan. Just today, I saw an apogee duet online. That would be so helpful especially that we want to encourage our son's talent of singing. However, it's way over our budget so I have to wait or save for that. I'm happy we are not impulse buyer anymore.

That's it and hopefully we can survive the 52-week money challenge.

How do you manage your expenses?
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