Budget Makeover Step 2: My Top Five Expenses and Steps 3, 4, 5 & 6 to Reduce Spending on the Top Five

So you have intrepidly gathered and tallied your grocery and toiletry receipts for a 30 day period. Good for you! That was a big accomplishment! Now you want to evaluate you spending. First, how much is your total spend You will want to know how much your total spending per month/30 days is so that What do you spend the most money on each week? I suggest that you choose the top five items in your monthly spending and seek to reduce the cost of those items each week.

How do you reduce the cost of a grocery line item? There are several ways. First, consider whether the item is really necessary. Perhaps your biggest expense is a (regular) impulse purchase. For example, I love coffee. I REALLY love coffee. I love it black, in coffee drinks *think frappuccino *, with expensive creamers. Yum. Now, I believe that coffee is necessary in our grocery budget. But, frankly, bottled coffee drinks at $1.50 or more per bottle are not. I can get the same effect by using milk and sucralose or sugar. For me, this is not really a necessary purchase if I am trying to reduce my grocery spending to meet financial goals that are important to my family. You get the idea. Honestly and prayerfully evaluate the top five in your monthly spending. Since you are looking at the top money users in your budget, you'll get the most bang for your buck reducing spending on these items.

So, now let's say you have looked at each of the top five in your budget over the past 30 days and determined that that each one is a necessary or sufficiently valuable element of your grocery spending. By sufficiently valuable, I mean those items that, yes, you could live without, but, no, you don't want to do so. For our family, I'll go back to the coffee example. My husband and I both love coffee and do not wish to give it up. It stays on the list. Now, the goal is to spend the least amount of money on that item. The next steps in our grocery budget make over seek to do that for each of the 5 items.

Step 3:  See if you can use and purchase less of the item.

Step 4: Determine less expensive alternatives to the item in question in order to reduce your cost.

Step 5: Shop sales for the item to reduce your overall spending on it. A price book page for those top five items is helpful to determine what a good "sales" price is.

Step 6: Add coupons on the item to the sales price and to get your best deal on that specific item.

I'll go into great detail on each of those steps separately in my next blog post(s).

To Be Continued...