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.