Still tracking the food/supplies expense category

The past few weeks I have been writing down every food receipt total in my notebook. This has been very helpful in knowing during the week how close I am getting towards my $250 budget (remember this includes household supplies, personal care and pet supplies). Since tracking for 3 weeks I came under budget about $50 the first 2 weeks and then went about $15 over last week. This week I am already at $306! Over budget!

But, writing this down I now see a bit better where/how I end up being over budget by the end of the month.  This weekend was time to get pet food for both the dogs and the cat. Just that alone came to 86.65 (plus the ridiculous almost 10% sales tax). That is more a once a month expense and I need to budget for it better in my planning. I did end up with 2 bags of cat food, so we are stocked up a bit on that, at least. But, I added some tablets to give the dogs so that (hopefully) their peeing on the lawn doesn't turn the lawn yellow. If it works, it appears we will have a $15 a month increase in their expenses unless/until I can find a cheaper alternative.

On a side ramble.....with our lawn all nice and green now we want to keep it that way and with 2 big dogs and lots of lawn, it's been hard to try and train them to go way out to the edge of the property to pee.  So, we are trying this route, with the tablets/wafers to give them. I purchased some Scott's lawn product yesterday to repair all the spots we do have. DD and I dug up the dead grass on all the stops and sprinkled the reseeding product and hopefully that will be the last of yellow spots on our lawn!

I'm also stocked up on 2 months worth of Miralax, so I won't have that expense and cat food to purchase next month. When we had my mom's garage sale the lady that cares for my grandma brought things to sell too. She had about 5 unopened bottles of Miralax super cheap, but they were about 6 months past the expiration date. They were probably just fine to use, but I was too scared to try them :(

All in all though - with all my purchases this weekend I saved $44.83 using coupons and gift cards and the 5% target discounts, not to mention the sale prices compared to regular prices I saved on. Since I now know I am over budget for the week, I can be especially careful the rest of the week, not to just spend, if it's not really necessary.

But, I do have one unexpected expense this week, not food related. I totally forgot that this week is DS's girlfriends birthday! Usually she's around to remind us, LOL, but she's been staying at her apartment by college all week because she got a full time summer job, so we've only been seeing her on weekends. I have no idea what to get her, so DD and I will either go shopping later today or tomorrow evening. She's easy to buy for - she loves everything, but that makes it almost harder. Might be time to make a trip to Bath and Bodyworks :-)