So starts a new way to budget...

I was looking online at crown financial and decided it's time to get the debt paid off. So that led to trying to figure out how to control our monthly spending. Using the cash envelopes isn't an option for us because we use Amex and pay it off monthly. So I came up with dividing what we have budgeted for the Amex into different categories.

I am using a coupon file pocket and have my budget divided into eating out, groceries/household, cat stuff, gas, school stuff/field trips, fast food(those days we are just too busy to eat at home), misc, newspaper and clothing/medical(since this is a category that isn't always the same each month I combined the two).

I gave myself a budget for each category and each category has a pocket and sticky note to keep a running total of what I have left in each category. I also keep all my receipts for the month so we can see what we are spending our money on.

I also went thru Sam's club the other day and wrote down the prices and sizes of the things we usually buy there so I can compare it to sale prices at the grocery stores and see if sales + coupons= a better deal than Sam's.

Coupon Binder

So after looking around at different ways to organize coupons I decided to go with the Coupon Binder idea. So here is what I came up with I used The Krazy Coupon Lady as my starting point. So here is the pile I started with, a binder, sheet protectors, dividers and the 9 card protector pages.

The inside of my binder, yes it's actually 2 separate three ring binders inside, thinking this will make it easier to find coupons I HOPE!!!

The left side of the binder where I will keep the current weekly ads.

How I have my coupons organized. Yes no coupons yet I just started up again and haven't had a chance to get a Sunday paper yet:) by Sunday night this will actually have coupons in it. I have 36 different categories

Page with all my frequent shopper cards :)

I print my weekly lists from www.practicalsaver.com So each store goes in a page protector with the coupons for that store. I also highlight the items I plan to buy.

Our first try at muffin tin lunches.

goldfish, yogurt, blueberries, grapes, pbj and chocolate chip bunnies