Weekly Budget Update:
Underspent Childcare: $1 (really just rounding in my budget)
Underspent Food by $20 (knew we’d be overspent in beer/wine so tried to offset this)
Overspent Beer/Wine by $36 (DH used food $ ‘by accident’)
Overspent Dining Out $6 (budget was 0 for this week)
Underspent Gas: $31

Total: Underbudget by $10 for the week

I was going to take that $10 out and add it to my $20 challenge money, but I’m going to let it ride. I suspect the underspending in Gas might be offset this week as just a timing of fillups. I’ll watch this for a few weeks to see what we really spend. It may fluctuate a bit from week to week. All in all, not too bad for our first week. It may take a while to get DH fully trained :-)

So, I feel like I’m about to cheat on my budget a bit this week. DH wants to do a big Costco run tonight. Buy a big piece of meat, diapers and a few other things. This will be funded by some money we have in savings not really earmarked for anything. So this run will be ‘outside’ the budget and not funded by any budgeted funds. It will certainly put less pressure on our weekly food budget. I feel like I’m cheating though – like I should just live on what’s in our budget. I guess since it’s my budget I can make the rules and I should just be thankful I have this money to use. This will leave some room in the food budget to perhaps stock up on a few good deals rather than have to spend it all on food for right now.

As I tweaked our budget over the past week, I somehow ended up with $20 extra dollars so I added that to my challenge money. I also decided that every other week (when it’s my week to get an ‘allowance’) I will take whatever change and $1 bills out of my wallet and put it in my challenge money. This week I had $4. I also found $1.16 in change around the house.

Beg Balance. $ .75
Additions: $25.16
New Balance $25.91