Tuesday, August 28, 2007

New Growth, New Budget

(yes, those are real Australian notes! LOL)

Doing my rounds of Bloggityville today I came across this great post over at SAHMmy Says.

As August draws to a close, I've had money on my mind. For my neck of the woods, Spring is right around the corner. There's new growth everywhere. Except in my purse!

A 'series of unfortunate events' over the last two or three months has left us with a short-yet-not-insignificant list of repairs and other necessary financial evils. Thankfully, there's hope around the corner. It's tax time here, meaning we just got our tax return back. As well as this, our social security system is very much geared towards families (nearly every family gets something from the government, even those, like ourselves, earning a decent wage - though the more you earn, the less you get in SS payments obviously) and we're being slipped little chunks of cash from the government in the form of rebates, schemes and family payments (I'd explain it in more detail, but it would bore the 85% of my readers (ie, those Stateside!) to tears, LOL). Bottom line, we have some bonuses coming in. We just need to prioritise what goes where.

But when I read the above post today, it reminded me that I was going to try something similar in September. I just need to work out the details. Everything is going up in the grocery store. Milk and cheese - eek! And the drought here in Australia has seriously affected the quality and price of our fruit and vegetables. It's far more economical in my area to go to a stand-alone greengrocer but it can be inconvenient to get to them. And Woolworths is just down the road. So its a constant juggling act between wanting to save time, and wanting to save money. However, I shall persevere!

I think its about time to dust off my super-dooper expense tracking spreadsheet system. I haven't used them in quite some time, but September is looking like the time to start it up again :)

Cheers,
Lizzie

4 comments:

SAHMmy Says said...

Thanks so much for mentioning my article! Good luck with your financial goals! Time vs. money is a hard one for me too--is the deal good enough to justify dragging the kiddos across town? Been poking around your site--lots of great stuff here!

Winterwood said...

lizzie - I bought some bananas yesterday they almost broke the bank - and other veg and fruit almost oo expensive to buy. 1 tip from me, I go to shop in shops that are in poorer suburbs - the food there is always cheaper in the supermarkets and I find that they have more specials! We have 5 at home so its important to budget too. I also donot buy anything for poeples birthday outside the family - cant afford it...its not a good thing but when hard pressed, why spend $ you cant afford! There are some wonderful frugal sites I go on like the Dollar Stretcher have you heard of this?

Winterwood said...

ps - we celebrate occassion in the family with a nice dinner at home and no gifts!

Lizzie said...

Garden Girl -

It's already in my sidebar ;P

I know what you mean about bananas though. My poor children only really go for apples and bananas so when prices started to go up it was apples, day in, day out. I tried dried and canned fruit, even those little tubs - no-one likes them. Grrr!

Cheers,
Lizzie

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