Savings and Goals Journal #26

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!

We had a wonderful time at home. We had so much fun watching the grandkids open their gifts, making special foods, and spending time together. They are at such a fun age!

In the Kitchen

Savings in the kitchen were minimal, as we had the expense of food for our Christmas Eve and Christmas Day meals. We made the charcuterie board, which was fun. We had some leftovers, and had food for a couple of days after.

We are discussing next year’s Christmas meals. Possibilities are corned beef, cabbage, potatoes and Irish soda bread (which I know is traditionally for St. Patrick’s Day, but Grampy loves it), or Mexican food.

This week’s meal plan:

• Sunday: Shake-n-Bake Pork Chops, roasted potatoes, salad
• Monday: Leftovers
• Tuesday: Hamburger gravy over rice, mixed veggies
• Wednesday: Leftovers
• Thursday: Blackeyed peas and ham, cornbread
• Friday: Nachos (Grampy and my daughter’s project. I’ll have blackeyed peas 🙂 )
• Saturday: Leftovers

In the Garden

The weather has been quite cold most days, so I haven’t been spending as much time as I’d like working outside. Most of my “In the Garden” work has been daydreaming about and planning for the spring!

I have several projects in mind for the spring: building some raised beds for the kitchen garden area, reworking the greenhouse to make it more functional and moving some flowers to different locations (to name a few!)

I want to spend some time mapping out the vegetable garden areas to maximize the use of our space. We will only be using the two gardens closest to our house (what we call the kitchen garden and the east garden). The west garden (which we won’t be planting in the spring) is past my dad’s house and often has issues with the irrigation water. It’s on a different system than the other two gardens and the water is often not there on the day we plan to water. We can grow all we need in the two spaces closest to our house.

Home and Family

The grandkids left Christmas morning to spend time at their dad’s house, so I got busy taking down the tree. My daughter and I used the corner where the tree was to make a play area. For storage, we used baskets and shelves we already had. It is much easier for the kids to put their toys away now, and we don’t have toys in the walkway as much as before.

My younger daughter was missing her sister Christmas Day. When they have spare time they sometimes do one another’s hair or makeup. For lack of another model, my daughter asked to do my hair and makeup. I don’t usually wear makeup and most days my hair is pulled up in a simple bun. It was very fun to be pampered!

My older daughter, her husband and his 5-year-old son visited us the day after Christmas. The kids all had a great time playing together.

Budget Update:

I’ve been diligently tracking our spending and evaluating our budget each week for slightly over a year. While we haven’t made monumental gains in the amount of money we have saved or in reducing the amount of money we owe, we are in a better position than we were in when I started.

I think the biggest benefit of the work I’ve done is that I now have a very good picture of where we spend our money. This is helping me see areas where we can cut back. I’ve also fine-tuned my budgeting system to be something that I like and that works well for me.

I’m proud of myself for sticking with it for this long. Several times I have worked on our finances, gotten discouraged and given up.

One of my financial goals in the new year is to improve in the area of staying within my budgeted grocery/household amount each week. I also want to be more consistent about communicating with Grampy about our finances. In the past, we’ve had a weekly budget meeting, where I fill him in on the finances. Lately we’ve gotten away from doing that.

I’ll be spending time during this last week of the year setting goals and setting up our budget for the coming year. I’m planning to do a “low-spend” month in January as our pantry is full and I’d like to use up some of the food we have as opposed to buying more. I’m kind of excited!

Have a wonderful week!