Week in Review (July 20-26)
By Matt - Monday, July 27th, 2009
This past week was a bit of a strange week for my wife and I because our baby daughter spent the week with her grandparents at a cottage. Most parents have no problem with the grandparents looking after their child for a week. Many of my favorite summer memories come from weeks spent with my grandparents. There is one difference – I remember these weeks where our daughter is still a baby. It was sad not to have her there and nice to be able to sleep a little. The spending this week was different from most weeks because the food budget was not consumed by grocery bills but by eating out a couple times (mostly because we rarely get a chance). Here are this weeks numbers:
| Budget | Actual | |
| Alcohol | $65.00 | $59.29 |
| Food@Office | $25.00 | $16.73 |
| Food | $125.00 | $165.09 |
| Gas | $75.00 | $62.33 |
| Entertainment | $50.00 | $87.56 |
| Smokes | $50.00 | $41.06 |
| Misc | $0.00 | $5.70 |
| Transportation | $18.00 | $18.00 |
| Stupid | $0.00 | |
| Bills | $140.00 | $143.26 |
| Baby | $0.00 | $38.99 |
| Investment | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| Total | $548.00 | $638.01 |
| Updated July 27, 2009 – 10:30 pm | ||
When you look at the bottom line I was over budget and there’s nothing that can change that fact; now the good thing was I was only $90 over budget. Unfortunately I was $90 over budget. But this was a week of spending the way I used, eating out rather than cooking and driving a lot more than I do now. The net result was we spent money where we normally don’t spend money. It was nice for a week to have some fun and eat out but at the same time I forgot just how expensive it was and we just ate out! I can only imagine what it would have been had we gone and ‘partied’ as we did in our twenties.
Now onto the other categories, it seems that I spent less on smokes and drinks than I have in the past couple weeks or at least these were moderately under control which was nice. I did forget to include money for miscellaneous items and I purposely left the baby item empty. While I spent in both areas the misc items were a lot less than they have been which was rather nice.
The net conclusion from this past week? While it was nice to be a little spontaneous I missed my daughter and wouldn’t trade randomly going out to dinner for seeing her smile before at the end of a day of work. And although I do enjoy going out to dinner once in a while I don’t enjoy the prices anymore. I have slowly turned into a practical parent type and I’m glad for for it. Now I just need to become the out of debt practical parent type.
This entry is filed under 2009, Weekly Budgets.
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