My May Challenge

I have set myself a task to save a certain amount of money by the end of the year. It is quite a large amount so to achieve it, I have broken it down into months, savings and challenges. For this month, I wanted to keep our food shopping down to $50 or less each week. There is or was quite a bit of food in the pantry and the freezer is pretty full.

First week on the first of May I set out with my shopping list and promptly spend $53.67 so over, not by much but still over. Second week I did better only spending $49.15, 85 cents clawed back.

Last Friday night, I discovered that we were out of butter and I had planned to have raisin toast for dessert, cant have raisin toast without!. Warren offered to go shopping IF I gave him a list. As I was tired and didn't want to go out just after I had arrived home from work, I accepted his offer a little fearful of my monetary challenge for the month, after all I was still behind a little.

My list has six things on it and he came home with two bags, not a good sign. I unpacked it and there were a couple of things in the bag that had not been on my list! I must admit though that they were things that we would use, the shopping receipt was in the bottom and he had only spent $32.06 and No butter!

Raisin toast was served with a smattering of jam on it. The next morning checking out the fridge for something else, I saw a pack of butter that I did remember buying when I did a big shop after our holidays. I had recently read how to make spreadable butter so I took the butter out to soften to turn it into a spreadable spread, the recipe also claimed to makes three times as much. Recipe called for 500gms of butter, not marg but real butter, a cup of powered milk and half a cup of olive oil, beat til smooth. It probably doubled but it will spread straight from the fridge and meant that I didnt have to go back to the shops.

Milk and yoghurt is getting low and they were on the list to buy.  Warren had to get our scripts done and it was a twenty minute wait so he went into the shops and bought some more yoghurt as he knew that he had used the last one and made it up that morning. I should still come under $50 for the week as there is not much else on the list.

Just transferred some money saved from the food shopping to our saving account so on track to make this months saving goal.